What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing (nurture, maintain and attend to leads) is a process where you develop relationships between buyers and all the sections of the sales funnel as well as all steps in the buying process. This will steer the company to prioritize marketing and communication towards those who are in need of the company’s services/products and to offer them the information they need in the sections that they are receptive.

The majority of companies miss 95% of their leads (source: Robertson Coaching International).

On average 50% of leads are not ready to buy (source: Marketo).

Approximately 80% of new leads never progress to sales (source: MarketingSherpa).

Companies that succeed with lead nurturing generate 50% more sales with 33% lower costs (source: Marketo).

Video explaining what Lead Nurturing is:

Note! More videos further down the article!
– Marketo
– Getresponse
– Salesforce

How do you rate leads (lead scoring)?

Every company needs to develop its own strategy to rate leads since each and every company has a unique purchasing routine, unique target group, etc.

4 categories for Lead Scoring:

1. Lead Fit (within your target audience)
In the first segment it is decided how well the lead matches your target group and regular customer. An example of information and data that can be used for this is demographics (men or women), geographic location, age, earlier purchases and loads more.

2. Lead Interest (shows interest in you)
The next step of lead scoring is to track their behavior online to determine how interested they are in your company. Are they spending lots of time on your website, are they engaged in your social channels, etc

3. Lead behaviour (signals for buying behavior)

The third step is to identify stronger purchase signals, are they out to buy or just reading your information?

Analyze how much of your website they are exploring and give a higher score if they for example download your content or if they register in any kind of form

4. Buying stage & timing (when to close)
In the fourth step you rank the visitors within the company sales funnel, for example those who click on prices, product trials, etc.

Are you under the assumption that Marketing Automation is so complicated that only big corporations can use it? – That is not the truth!

Marketing Automation is scalable and grows simultaneously with the company

How can Marketing Automation aid Lead Nurturing?

A single entrepreneur can build credibility and maintain conversations med 15-20 people at once, while a small market division can handle up to 50. However, you need more than 50 in this process in order to create continuous growth.

Marketing Automation is a technical solution which streamlines the company’s time, resources and costs for multiple channels together, thereby increasing the number of sales.

With an automated “workflow” all your marketing efforts can run jointly, all while you are ensuring that every lead gets relevant information at the right time, so that no lead falls through the cracks.

Attract, nurture and deliver hot leads

Leads (potential buyers) have often formed an opinion and taken a decision before talking to a salesman. How can you build a relationship with them before they come in contact with a salesman?

It is all about getting exposure that makes the right statement towards the potential buyer in furtherance of initiating a relationship.

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Increase activity at the top of the sales funnel

Your leads often want to be in control and to discover information for themselves first, but put yourself in their shoes, what do you want to see?

Attract more traffic at the funnels opening by using internal and external market measures and convert this to leads through customized landing pages and progressive forms.

Increase the quality of a lead

Score your leads depending on their behavior and communication with your brand.

Through Lead Scoring you gain the ability to prioritize resources on hot leads as well as getting more and quicker closings.

Help the sales team

When hot leads arrive, details like response time and context becomes very important. Help your salesmen prioritize with the backing of “urgency ratings” and by producing KPI:s (Key Performance Indicators) that they can follow to make sure that they prioritize correctly.

Track, analyze and implement

You get clear guidelines for which activities serves to contribute more leads and sales through the whole funnel by tracking what works and what, does not. Utilize the traceability with the help of modern technology and increase your knowledge about your customer’s conduct in order to make better judgments

Recommended software for lead nurture

Today there is a plethora of software for this, listed here is some of the programs that we deem exceptional and well-worth a try

Marketo

Marketo is considered number #1 in Marketing Automation. Our world within digital marketing is constantly changing and we always need to find new methods to engage and cooperate with people along the way. Marketo claims to have the solution for this.

Salesforce

Participate in our workshop on Lead Nurturing!

This autumn we are holding a workshop on Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation, together with some of the most eminent people in the field. The workshop will be held in Stockholm during the autumn of 2016.

Register your interest in the form below so that we can contact you with more information about the time and date of the event.

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